Monday, December 3, 2012

Cancer Cells Self-Destruct in Blind Mole Rats

Brought to you by: Emilynne

Blind mole rats fight cancer by killing off cells in a messy type of cellular suicide known as necrosis. 
Credit: Courtesy of Andrei Seluanov

4 comments:

Bianca said...

This article was very interesting. I hope scientist are able to do it to humans some day. The blind mole rat is a fascinating creature, that should be known by to all cancer researchers. Along with the blind mole rat their is also the naked mole rat. They have different ways of geting rid of cancer.the naked role rat have a cell-death program that turns on when they is a large quantity of cells. This might happen in a tumor. While the blind mole rat does a different thing. They both have low oxygen, that usually helps the cells commit suicide. But the blind mole rat had a cancer-fighting protein called p53. That mutation prevents cells from having to undergo apoptosis. (a type of cell death that dismantles themselves from the inside. My mom already knows about this (she is a cancer researcher), and she said that this can really help if researchers can find out how to successfully have a human use it. They can not just simply put it in a human. Researches wonder how necrosis heads off tumors without damaging healthy tissue. That research is important, because necrosis can cause inflammation. Nice Emilynne! L<3VE this topic. I would love to know more though. Where is the scientists research at? Have they gotten close?

Jahan said...

I agree with Bianca. This article is amazing. I have read a little bit about naked mole rats and National Geographic said that they live longer than their mice cousins because they never get cancer. If we could adapt to live underground, we might never get cancer again, just like the naked and blind mole rats. Have they discovered how to help humans have this amazing ability? Have they been able to test their DNA and try some mutations on a human so that the human would never get cancer?

Chloe said...

I think that this article is really amazing because if we could find a way to make our bodies fight off/avoid the cancer cells like the moles do, then we too could prevent people from getting cancer, or even remove cancer from people even at higher forms of it. They could use this information and turn it into something really life changing and revolutionary to the world of cancer research! If scienctists and researchers could just find out how this could apply to humans, they could completely change the world we live in. They would be able to stop hundreds of people dying from cancer! Overall, I think that this topic is a VERY interesting topic to research! This article was really cool and I think it is on the track to something huge!

Nicholas said...

That article was awesome! But the problem was that they were saying a lot of stuff that did not have an explanation. Why do they release this chemical called "interferon-beta" that goes out when the cell dies. How can animals do this but we cannot? I think that there was an article a few weeks ago about how animals can do something we cannot. It is amazing how I have learned that some animals can do stuff we can't. Overall it is amazing how these mole rats can help themselves.